WITH Oscar buzz roaring in his ears, Spanish stud Javier Bardem is growing increasingly nervous – and he doesn’t like the feeling.”Maybe I feel nervous because it’s something that I never wished,” says Bardem, 31, in New York yesterday to pick up a Best Actor award from the National Board of Review.

“People talk about it on and on, and it puts the virus of expectation into you.”

His soulful turn as persecuted Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas in “Before Night Falls” has made Bardem the talk of Tinseltown.

With Best Actor props from the Venice Film Festival and the Board of Review, a Golden Globe nomination and almost universal critical praise, Bardem is inching his way toward the golden prize – with all its attendant hoopla.

And he swears he didn’t see it coming.

“The movie opened in the States and all this happened and I am really shocked. I’m from Madrid; I don’t belong to this world, this culture. So when people say Golden Globe, along with Tom Hanks, possible Oscar nomination, whatever, it sounds very far away for me.”

Hollywood star makers are circling like vultures. Recently, an agent approached Bardem at the New York Film Festival. “He came up to me and said, ‘I’m going to make you a big star.’

“I said to him, ‘First you have to ask me if I want to be a big star.'”

Too late. With 16 films under his belt, Bardem is already Spain’s most acclaimed young actor. But, with the exception of the bawdy satire “Jamon Jamon” and the screwball comedy “Mouth to Mouth,” he was relatively unknown in America – until director Julian Schnabel cast him in “Before Night Falls” after Benicio Del Toro dropped out.

But Bardem’s experience in Spain – where he literally achieved overnight success after the release of “Jamon Jamon” in 1992 (complete with full frontal nudity) – prepared him somewhat.

He is fiercely protective of his private life – all he will say is that he lives with his girlfriend of nine years, a translator, in inner-city Madrid.

He can’t stand being dubbed “the next Antonio Banderas,” mainly because he doesn’t want to become tabloid fodder like Mr. Melanie Griffith.

“I’ve been famous for 13 years in Spain and they don’t know me very well in my country because I always try to avoid interviews about my family, if I have a girlfriend, if I’m gay, whatever,” he says. “If you don’t play the game, it’s easy not to get into it.”

Bardem has just wrapped his second American film – John Malkovich’s directing debut, “The Dancer Upstairs” – and is scouting around for his next project.

He’s not scoping out mansions on Mulholland Drive yet, but he’s prepared to follow good scripts, wherever they take him.

“I guess movie actors are like tomatoes. We are like a product. And also you have to sell yourself in order to be in the big salad, which I don’t like very much. I’ve done many movies in Spain. Now, maybe it’s time for a change.”